


In Waiting

by stardust_made



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has just landed from Afghanistan. "He can’t remember exactly at what point airports started being a problem, but as he’s waiting at Baggage Claim for what looks like to be the last time from that particular destination, he hates the place."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Waiting

  
He can’t remember exactly at what point airports started being a problem, but as he’s waiting at Baggage Claim for what looks like to be the last time from that particular destination, he hates the place. Granted, he’s not his most stable. He’s still reeling too much by the events of the last four months: being shot, suffering with that infection and barely making it through, and finally, facing the decision of the medical board about his permanent return to England. But with what coherent part of him is left at his disposal John Watson loathes airports—or rather, what they represent.

He’s always had the feeling that everything about them makes people’s deficits more prominent. Take the simplest things—and the fact that John calls these ‘the simplest’ is already significant about how bad it really gets. But yes, simple: disabilities, conditions, illnesses—all triggered or made worse by flight. It’s not by accident that people’s phobias and their connected to flying neurotic displays are the subject of ridicule in so many movies. They’re recognizable because _so many fucking people have them_. Okay, he’s British—he knows you sometimes have to laugh at your fears in order to stand tall to them. But sadly, there’s very little good taste in what he’s seen in those films that mock something as mighty and awesome as an irrational fear.

Going deeper—what are the common reasons for flights? Another preposterous misconception—that people ‘travel the world’, in the romantic sense of ‘seeing the world’. John has seen a fair bit of the world and frankly, he can’t understand what all the hoopla is about. But leaving his personal feelings aside, the romantic notion of globetrotting doesn’t even make it to the most common reasons for air travel at all! People travel because they’re miserable. They leave their countries and immigrate to other countries in search of a better life, or in an attempt to escape from themselves. Or both. But you can’t uproot a tree from the ground, place it into new, foreign soil, and have it continue to grow as if nothing's happened. Half the time John was in Afghanistan, he longed for home. Half the time he spent back home, he missed Afghanistan. Those who change countries in their adulthood are amongst the most wretched souls on the planet, and John won’t hear any different. So where's the fun in either coming back home, when your everyday life is in another place, or coming back to your everyday life when you know that you’re leaving home behind?

Thank God, the belt is finally moving. There was a flight from Tripoli, landing at the exact time as John’s one, so that must have delayed the bags.

In proportion, very few people travel for pleasure. Those who aren’t torn between two homes, two cultures, two realities travel for business. They have the joy of spending hours in the air, their cardiovascular system slowly but surely affected for the worse, and all they have to look forward to is another generic hotel room at the end of the flight. Meanwhile, there’s the dumb movie on the screen, or the movie they've already seen, or the ubiquitous puffs of steam out of the window. Because let’s face it, at some point during the umpteenth business trip things just lose the very basic poetry they contain, and even the term ‘cloud’ begins to sound too lyrical for what the eye sees.

Naturally, it’s the eye that is the real problem, because clouds are clouds and bags are bags and London is London—they are neither more nor less than they could ever be; nothing different but _exactly_ what they are. It’s what John transfers onto them from his own rattled, anguished mind that gives them their properties.

John hoists his bag over his healthy shoulder and starts limping in the direction of the exit.

Ridiculously, and again thanks to the countless maudlin scenes on TV and film, the popular stereotype of airports is of the reversed—happiness, represented by the exuberant smiles of people. Those arriving and those waiting for them. All subtle or overt troubles in the relationship forgotten; all animosity, jealousy, competitiveness, selfishness, insecurities, old quarrels, recent terse exchanges, the entire bloody wealth of complexity a relationship could carry—all put on hold. For that moment, there, when someone’s face lights up at the glimpse of a familiar jacket or a head full of, oh, say, curls. Because despite all of the above, that head of curls contains a special place where just for one moment you stop being only your old, plain, lost self; you stop being so very alone.

Well, that’s a big fat lie. John is grateful he isn’t prone to fanciful flights of fantasy; it stops him from losing his own head and believing this myth to be more than that—a myth, designed by millions of similarly plain and lost people to keep them going by giving them the one thing that seems to be the most resilient manifestation of the human soul: hope.

He comes out to not exactly a sea but at least a lake of faces, all of them equally unfamiliar, but a lot of them sporting an expression that John didn’t take into account in his reflections. That mix of anticipation and concentration, mingled with a dash of eagerness, so evident in the light stretch of the neck. Funny how even that tall fellow with the odd face over there, who is surely able to see everyone without any effort, has also got the tautness in the line of his neck that universally means _Where are you? Come out already_.

John, of course, can’t be spotted—and there isn’t anyone here to spot him, either. He pushes his way unobtrusively, an anonymous face in an anonymous crowd, and heads for the heart of the biggest anonymous metropolis in the world.

***

Sherlock is grateful for the invention of the aeroplane, for it means he isn’t confined to solving cases in Britain only, _and_ it enables the import of more inventive criminals to the UK. However, that is all the good word he can put in for air travel. Airports, in particular, he finds vexing. Too busy, and they smell of filth and disinfectant. Plus they are one of the rarest, most distilled representation of the humdrum of the human kind.

They also give him a headache.

He’s figured out the case; now it’s only a matter of confirming the culprit through the suitcase the woman should be pulling. There is nothing left to distract Sherlock, and while he’s waiting—it looks like there was a flight from Kabul, landing at the same time as the one from Tripoli—he cannot stop his mind from registering, observing, deducing. He doesn’t want to deduce. Everyone here is boring. The world is _full_ of boring people who evidently delight in getting together. That’s even more depressing. Sherlock would give his arm—his left one because sadly, like with most things in life, Mycroft got the better deal and is the ambidextrous one—but yes, Sherlock would give his left arm to spot one person here that isn’t plain. Someone different; someone you can’t miss. He isn’t a specialist in people, but for a second he allows himself the awkward, frail experience of fantasising about that person. There’d be clues all over him or her to indicate _Interesting!_ It would be _obvious_. This person would stand out like an auspicious tower of thrilling details. An exciting person in an exciting package—

Sherlock catches himself stretching his neck subconsciously as if looking for...What a peculiar thing the brain is, how it derives so much from the smallest flicker of the imagination and commands the rest—body and mind—to follow the scent of hope. Sherlock’s shoulders drop again and he frowns at himself, half-annoyed, but half-perplexed, too, at his sudden…yearning for another human being. How unlike him.

It must be the airport.

Ah! There’s the suitcase!

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed—apologies for any mistakes. Original entry at my Livejournal [over here](http://stardust-made.livejournal.com/32964.html).


End file.
